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ADDRESS 

Delivered by 

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL HOMER FOLKS 






" THE HUMAN COSTS 
OF THE WAR " 



Under the auspices of the 
MUNICIPAL COURT EDUCATIONAL DEP'T 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

-vgCElVED 

DECl4.1d22 

DOCUMENT.-* uiV.tilOi 






Homer Folks was Lieutenant- Colonel in the American 
Red Cross and Director of the Department of Civil Affairs of 
the American Red Cross in France, Chief of the Red Cross 
Survey Mission in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Belgium and France. 
"The Human Costs of the War," an address delivered Friday, 
October 10, 1919, in Room 676, City Hall, is based on his book 
published by Harper Brothers. 

Mr. Folks is a leader in the field of public service ; former 
President of the New York State Probation Commission; 
former Commissioner of Public Charities in New York City; 
organizer of Public Relief in Cuba under General Wood, etc. ; 
and Author of "The Care of Destitute, Neglected and Delin- 
quent Children." 



In introducing Lieutenant-Colonel Folks, Honorable 
Charles L. Brown, President Judge of the Municipal Court, 
said: 

We are gathered here today to hear an inspiring message 
from a great leader in public service, and we are fortunate, 
indeed, to have Colonel Folks here to inaugurate for us the 
series of addresses which we purpose to give on matters con- 
cerning the public service and the public welfare. These 
addresses we thought should be for the benefit of our staff 
alone, and that is a very large one. I feel, however, that we 
should let the community have the benefit of the inspiration 
that the talks of the men and women who are leading authori- 
ties in the field of public service will bring us. Therefore, we 
have extended the invitations to men and women of this com- 
munity whose co-operation make such real work as the big 
work of our Municipal Court possible. We are going to bring 
here to these meetings to address you, people who will help you, 
who are in the social service of the Court, and you who are in 
other fields of public and private social service. They will 
bring new vision, new hope and new suggestions and guidance 
for our work. 

I wish to say a word on other plans we have for our own 
workers. Through the co-operation of public-spirited citizens, 
it has become possible for us to provide certain of you who are 
in the service of our Court, with the opportunity for work at 
the Pennsylvania School for Social Service, so that you may 
increase our potentiality for service to the public. I say you 
have the privilege of taking these courses, but I also want to 
say that I appreciate your helpfulness and willingness to under- 
take this effort, which means extra time and extra labor. I 
desire to thank you for responding so wholeheartedly to my 
plans for training for public service. I am only sorry that cir- 
cumstances prevent more than ten of you from undertaking this 
work. I know those of you who are going will not be dis- 
appointed in the trouble your efforts will give you. 

We will try to have these public meetings once or twice a 
month. On November 7th, Miss Maude E. Miner, Director of 



the Girls' Protective Leagues and Chairman of the Board of 
Directors of the National Probation Association, will speak on 
Probation Work with Women and Girls. On November 14th, 
Doctor Charles A. Beard, Director of the Bureau of Municipal 
Research, New York City, under whose direction is conducted 
the Training School for Public Service, will speak on "Train- 
ing for Public Service." Mr. Burdette G. Lewis, Commissioner 
of Correction of the State of New Jersey, will address us on 
December 12th. 

These meetings are open to all who may be interested. I 
hope that through them we, of the Municipal Court, will be able 
to make our contribution to a better understanding of the prob- 
lems of the public aspects of social service. These are, indeed, 
the times that try men's souls; and it is only by the constant 
effort to arrive at a better and a deeper understanding of our 
tasks that we can be helpful to each other. 

Colonel Folks is our speaker today. He came to our city 
to preside at the National Tuberculosis Conference and we are 
especially privileged to have him address us. To our Municipal 
Court he stands as a symbol. He is a pioneer in probation 
work. I believe he outlined the organization of the first State 
Probation Commission, that of New York, of which he is now 
President. His interest, among his many interests, has always 
been in children. He is the author of a book which is a 
standard for workers with children, "The Care of Destitute, 
Neglected and Delinquent Children." I think that our staff, 
and all those interested in children, should read that book. 
Colonel Folks has had an experience in France which is bound 
— by the greatness of his duties in a great world crisis — to 
carry inspiration to all working in social service or to those 
interested in it. It was his duty to help relieve the distress of 
the suffering civilians in France. He was Director of the 
Department of Civil Affairs of the American Red Cross in 
France, Chief of the Red Cross Survey Mission in Italy, Greece, 
Serbia, Belgium and France. He is embodying his experience 
in a book, which Harper Brothers will publish and which will 
appear serially in Harper's Magazine. It is the highest privilege 
to have Colonel Folks address us upon "Human Costs of the 
War," an address based upon that book. 

Allow me to present Colonel Folks. 



ADDRESS 



Judge Brown, Probation Officers and Social Workers of 
Philadelphia: 

Before entering upon my real subject, I must delay a 
moment to express my gratification at the fact that this oppor- 
tunity for training and this series of talks on matters of social 
welfare are being made available for the probation officers of 
the Municipal Court. I am not sure that my acceptance was 
not due to my sense of the unusual character of the occasion. 

It is a very exceptional thing that Judge Brown and his 
colleagues have done. I have known of courses of training for 
probation officers arranged by themselves, or arranged by a 
State Commission, but in no previous instance have I known 
the court itself to foresee the need and actually plan for such 
opportunities for those important arms of the court, the 
probation officers. 

In doing this Judge Brown has done a service to the cause 
of probation throughout the entire country, and I am sure that 
his example will be followed in other cities. 

I confess that I consented to appear in court with a great 
nervousness, perhaps apprehension, but since I have had a 
good look at the jury, I feel reassured and I feel reasonably 
confident that I shall, at least, secure disagreement if not an 
actual acquittal at the end of the proceedings. 

I shall speak to you for a time on substantially the question 
of human welfare in Europe as affected by the war. I speak 
of Europe for two reasons : in the first place, because I must, 
I have to. Anyone who has seen and participated in the work 
of relief from the sufferings caused by the war in Europe, and 
who has caught even a glimpse of the true condition of the 
peoples of Europe today, must inevitably feel that the most 
useful thing that he can do is to try to give some expression to 
those facts which are so little understood, and perhaps can be 
so little understood, by those who have not actually seen them at 
first hand. Secondly, I speak of Europe, and of the opposite of 



human welfare in Europe, because I am disposed to think that 
we, as social workers or probation officers, or persons interested 
in human welfare in America, can do nothing to steady our 
perspective and give us a point of view of what the world is 
and needs, more properly than to become a bit more informed 
and to think a little bit more about the actual, present conditions 
of the people of Europe. 

Social work involves a sort of an ideal on our part. As 
social workers we are all doing what we can to see that men, 
women and children all have a chance to live happy and useful 
lives, not cut short by sickness and death, and not deprived of 
fruition by causes beyond their control. There has never been 
anything in the history of the world which has in such a whole- 
sale way had an opposite effect on so many people as the war. 

I will begin with the point which we appreciate perhaps 
more readily, because we have seen something of them, — the 
effects of the mobilization of the armies. Probation officers, 
relief workers and Red Cross members, have some appreciation 
of the problems of human need and changed human circum- 
stances that are involved in the mobilization of an army. The 
tremendous home service of the Red Cross is just one of the 
things that had to be done to carry relief and aid and assistance 
to families from which the men had been called to serve their 
country. We mobilized in America something like four million 
men, and that mobilization disarranged our entire industrial 
life, upset a great many things that we had thought were 
permanently arranged, and made an extraordinary demand 
upon all our relief and social agencies and workers. 

Let me call your attention to the extreme degree to which 
those problems existed in the European countries, our allies and 
our friends. In the first place, the mobilization of the men of 
those countries was several times greater than ours was at its 
greatest. France had a population a little more than a third of 
that of the United States. She mobilized somewhere between 
six and seven millions of men. If we had mobilized a corre- 
sponding number in proportion to our population we should 
have called together an army, not of four million, but of some- 
thing like twenty millions of men, and the interference with the 
normal life of the community and of families would have been 
more than five times as great, because we selected the younger 



men, and preferably the men without families or dependents, 
whereas in France every man between eighteen and fifty, who 
was physically fit, unless he was the father of five children 
living, was mobilized. Some of them were, of course, retained 
to work in the necessary industries, to run the transportation, 
work the mines, keep the munition factories going, but practi- 
cally every man fit to be a soldier was enrolled in the army in 
France; so that the interference with the productive life of 
the country and with the relations between fathers and children 
was a good deal more than five times as great as was that of 
the United States. 

The second striking fact is that it is the custom in Euro- 
pean countries to pay their soldiers a very nominal sum. They 
serve their country as a matter of duty, not as a matter of 
employment. A soldier in France — and this is practically true 
of the European countries outside of England — was paid the 
equivalent in our money of five cents a day when at the front, 
and two or three cents a day when assigned to service in the 
rear. There is no question of allotments and allowances from 
soldiers' wages for the assistance of their families in the Euro- 
pean countries. As a matter of fact, the support afforded their 
families by these men was simply dropped, with nothing to take 
its place, for an appreciable period of time. Afterward an 
allowance was made by the Government to families of soldiers, 
an allowance which amounted to about the equivalent of 25 
cents per day for an adult and less than that for children, an 
allowance which, when made, would cover the cost of food, 
leaving practically nothing else for other expenditures, but 
which, with the rise of prices, would hardly even buy the neces- 
sary food for those who were compelled to buy their food. 

The third difference between ourselves and European 
countries as to mobilization, is that while our men were 
mobilized for a year or a year and a half, or varying periods 
of about that length, the soldiers of France and of those other 
countries were mobilized for a period of four years and a half. 
Europe was a continent of manless homes during that time. The 
Judge of your Juvenile Court knows what it means to have the 
men all away and away for some time. We all know that delin- 
quency is apt to arise. The father of the household is more 
than the support. He is the steadying factor. His place in 



10 

the household is always supreme and nothing takes his place, 
even if there were an allowance that made up the actual 
financial deficit. The absence of practically all the men for a 
period of four years and a half was bound to be followed by 
social results of the most far-reaching and most disastrous 
character, as they were. 

The next result of war, of course, after mobilization is 
fighting. We all think of that when we think of war. We see 
the clash of the armies on the field and we hear the shrieks of 
the wounded, and in our imagination we see the men who died 
on the field of battle. We have felt it in our own localities. I 
said to a neighbor of mine, a few days after my return, whom 
I happened to meet on the street, "I hope your boys are back 
from France by this time ?" He turned away and he said, "All 
that are coming back. One is not coming back." I had two 
other friends in my little home town who lost their boys in 
France. It seemed to me quite a number in my little circle of 
acquaintances. I picked up the graduating class publication of 
the High School of Yonkers, and on the first page, in a black 
border, there were the pictures of the boys who would have 
graduated that year, but did not and never will. They graduated 
to another world. There were seventeen of them out of that 
small group. It seemed to me we had an extraordinary number 
of deaths in our little town. I read in the evening paper 
shortly afterwards the proceedings of a memorial meeting, with 
a list of the Yonkers boys that died, and it filled about three- 
fourths of a column. I was perfectly astounded at the number. 
It never occurred to me that out of a total of 50,000 deaths of 
American boys there would be so many in a town of 100,000 
people. I made a little calculation to see what would be the 
average quota, so to speak, for a place of 100,000 people, and 
one mathematical operation showed that it would be about 45. 
It dawned on me for the first time after my absence that from 
a community in America of the size of 100,000 people the 
average was some 45 of their boys who would not return, a 
number which would really cast a shadow of gloom and of 
mourning and of sorrow over all American communities. Then 
I thought, what would it be if we had been in the war as long 
and as deeply as those European countries? Specifically, I 
thought of France, where on every street in every city, and 



11 

every day, one of the most conspicuous things you see is the 
widow's black veil. France, with about a third of our popula- 
tion, lost about a million and three-quarters of men, including 
actual deaths known and registered, and most of the nearly 
300,000 of the missing will never return, to say nothing of the 
deaths among the prisoners. A little mathematical calculation 
showed me that if we had lost as many in proportion, we would 
have lost about seven and a half millions of men, — something 
like that, speaking from memory. At any rate, it was ninety- 
five times the number in proportion to population so that our 
little town of Yonkers, if it had lost its boys and its men — 
because they were of ages up to 50 — in the same proportion 
that France lost her boys and her men, would not be mourning 
forty-five or fifty boys, it would be mourning 4,300 in that 
community of 100,000 people. 

That, perhaps, gives us a little better impression of France, 
of Serbia, largely of Italy, and, to some extent, of Belgium. 
We simply cannot understand the extent to which those coun- 
tries are permeated and soaked through and through with the 
strain of sorrow and loss and suffering and grief for the men 
and boys that have gone. The actual number of deaths among 
the Allied soldiers is over seven and a half millions, to say 
nothing of the missing, and the number of men killed by the 
war in Europe is certainly in excess of ten millions. That 
creates a problem of social hardship, in widowhood, in orphan- 
age, the proportions of which stagger our imagination, the 
effects of which will last for decades. Not probably until the 
opening of the next century will there be no one who can look 
back and say, "How different life might have been for me if I 
had not lost my father in the great war." 

But that question of loss, of widowhood, of the orphans, 
of the soldiers who died, and the million — or whatever the num- 
ber is, for it is more than a million — of permanent cripples, are 
things we all know about in a way, the first things we think 
about when we think about war. There are other phases that 
are less well known, but perhaps are even more significant and 
distressful for the future of the peoples of Europe. When an 
army comes into a country, a foreign army — and it was with a 
wonderfully deep understanding of the nature of war that Ger- 
many planned to carry on war in the other countries' territory — 



12 

when an army rolls in, there are civilians there of course. The 
army comes there unexpected and very rapidly, and you have to 
do one of two things, to run and leave, or to go down in the 
cellar and wait until it goes by. There were four million and 
a half of people in the part of France that Germany overran. A 
million and a half of them ran, and three millions went down to 
the cellars. I want to trace just a little further just what 
happened to those people and the people similarly placed all 
through the other countries, from the North Sea all the way up 
through and around into Russia. You have all read of the 
people who went away, the refugees. I know that you have all 
seen the pictures of them streaming down the roads of France, 
taking up one or two or three things that they thought most of 
or thought most valuable, tying them up in a package and just 
walking away as fast and as far as they could walk, to keep 
ahead of the incoming army, and finally reaching a railway, 
being packed like animals in cattle cars, crowded in as closely 
as they could possibly be crowded, and taken into the interior 
for one, two, three or four days ; stopped at sidings to let other 
trains go by, with no protection from the cold weather to speak 
of, and then arriving. That is the part we have all read about, 
the people driven from their homes with a few moments' 
notice in that way. 

But the real claim on our sympathy arises from what 
happened to them after that. That is the real thing. We could 
travel three or four days, if we had to, under uncomfortable 
circumstances and get along. We don't expect to sleep very 
well when we travel, ordinarily, and our meals are interrupted 
and we do not have a very comfortable time as a rule. But 
when this million and a half of people got to where they were 
going, that was when the real trouble began, because nobody 
was expecting them there excepting for a day or two or even 
an hour or two before they came. There was nowhere for 
them to go. People were already living in all the houses. There 
was nothing for them to do, no extra work to be done. Every- 
thing was disorganized by the war. There was no comfortable 
place to go to live. There was no additional furniture to buy, 
there was no additional wood and hardly enough food to go 
around. It was five or ten per cent, of the original population 
of those communities just thrown upon them. Suppose you 



13 



had in Philadelphia here another ten per cent, of people 
dumped down upon you without any notice, or not, perhaps, 
more than twenty hours' notice, what would you do with them? 
Suppose it was winter time? Well, they went into churches, 
they slept on the floors in the aisles, they went into the stables, 
from which the horses had been taken for the army. They 
would go into an empty factory that had been closed because 
of the war— any old place at all, and hardly anybody thought 
of having more than one room for a family. These were 
people who had lived comfortably, mind you. They were not 
unsuccessful people, they were all the people— educated and 
uneducated, workers and professionals, and they all had to 
crowd up and they were all lucky if they did not have more 
than one family in a room. A large room like this would 
probably be used by hanging some burlap on strings or wires, 
and dividing the room into little squares about ten feet square. 
Each of those little squares was a home for a family,— the 
mother and grandmother, an old grandfather, perhaps, and 
some young boys and girls of all ages and a baby or two. Each 
little square was a home for a family. There was not much, 
if any, coal to be had. You could not dream of getting enough 
to keep warm. You might get enough to cook with if you were 
clever. There was almost no kerosene or oil to be had and 
they lived in darkness and damp, cold and gloom, in unem- 
ployment and insufficient income. They had no money to buy 
clothes if their clothes wore out. They did not have hardly 
any bedding with them, and there was hardly any more to buy. 
They had a wretched time. They got sick, but the doctors were 
all called to the army. They never had any trained nurses any- 
where in France. There were no doctors to look after them. 
Then was the real trouble. People helped, of course, and the 
Government gave them an allowance to buy food with after a 
little while, and the Red Cross set up a distributing agency bye 
and bye towards the very end of the war, when they got around 
to it. But there, a million and a half of people who had been 
refugees and exiles from home, crowded into any old place. 
They lived that way for four years. There is the hard part — 
for four years. There is a test of your vitality to stand up 
against all those things that break down your health and 



14 

resourcefulness. For four years, not four days, — four years 
of exile under those conditions. 

How many were there of them? A million and a half I 
said was the number in France in 1914 and half a million 
more came along in the spring of 1918. That is two million 
people in France. That is only a beginning of refugees. There 
were refugees from Belgium to the number of about a million ; 
in Italy half a million; in Greece several hundred thousands; 
in Serbia I don't know how many, but there were thousands 
and thousands and thousands of them. All through Rumania, 
Russia and Austria there were refugees from the front. When 
the Russians invaded it, half a million Germans were driven 
out of east Prussia. There were ten or twelve million people, 
at least, living in the way I have just described, all the standards 
simply knocked to pieces, all the ways they had learned how to 
live through these centuries, to be cleanly, to be decent and 
educate their children, all their standards were knocked into 
smithereens, and they were living in any way they could to get 
along for a period of four and a half years. 

You cannot do that without breaking down for a long 
time to come the standard of living, of welfare, of that enor- 
mous number of people. The war ended and they began to go 
back, ten million people, to their homes. I wish I had time to 
describe to you what they found when they got back, and what 
they did. They went back to the devastated areas, as we say. 
You have seen pictures of that until you are sick and tired of 
"devastated areas." But these people had to see the devastated 
areas from the inside, not from the outside. They went there 
to live. That was where they came from. Those were their 
homes. They went back and had to dig in the cellar to see 
whether there was an archway still standing; if there was, they 
would get a few bits of furniture and make their home in the 
cellar. I recall on my last visit to the city of Lens, the coal 
mining city, there were only a few streets you could go on at 
all. You would think there was nobody there at all, but if 
your automobile happened to blow its horn, they would begin 
to come up out of the ground here and there among these ruins, 
from places you could not see were occupied by anybody. It 
was very pathetic, but it was very curious. You could not help 
thinking of the way woodchucks pop up out of their holes in 



15 



the fields of clover. Think what it means. Those ten million 
people are living under conditions that are as much worse now 
than when they were in exile, as those conditions were worse 
'than those they originally came from. They were darker 
colder and gloomier, damp and underground, and it will be 
twenty year! before they are rebuilt. All the statements y0 u 
read Jbout this, that and the other place being rebuilt this year 
or next year,-put them down as absolutely not so. ■ Abou all 
that has been accomplished really in all that area is to clear 
away barbed wire and clear up some of the Greets get some 
of the railroads running, get the canal opened up-a few things 
like that There has been no beginning at actually rebuilding 
the peoples' houses. There are a few wooden barracks A 
barracks is a thing you and I would not think good enough for 
a cow stable, because it is just an affair of boards roughly put 
together. But a barracks is the ideal of a house. It is the best 
even for the Mayor, the head of the town. A few barracks m 
a city of ten thousand people, for the very select people of the 
town, that is the very best you find; otherwise you find bits of 
old building paper and a few stakes, and so on, stuck up 
together in any kind of shape for a shelter. The people will 
live there through the winter to come and nobody knows how 
long after that. 

I want to go back a moment to another phase. You have 
heard much less about it even than the refugees. The three 
million people who went down cellar when the storm passed 
bv when the tornado of war swept overhead, of course did not 
stay down cellar very long. It was maybe for a day or two, 
and then they came up. They were the conservatives. I sup- 
pose the radicals that were willing to try anything went away, 
but the conservatives stayed down in the cellar and came up 
They came up in a changed world. They were under the control 
of an army of an enemy country. They hadn't any rights any 
more They couldn't be sure of keeping anything they had. 
Whatever the other fellow wanted he took. If he wanted to 
live in a house he moved in, and made the people in the house 
take care of him. He was likely to take the products of their 
work They were subject to all the shortages that the blockade 
placed upon the Central Powers (which finally brought them 
to terms), only it was worse. They suffered all the blockade 



16 

effects plus the fact that their things were taken away from 
them by the enemy to send back to the people at home when they 
began to be short. As the smoke clears away a little bit and 
we look over the situation, they seem to have suffered most of 
all. The people who went away got away from the war. The 
people who stayed, stayed under the control of this army of 
the enemy, and when you come to look over what happened 
you see that after all the effects of the shortage of food were 
more serious upon them than upon the people who went off 
into the interior. 

The largest city in France that was occupied was Lille. 
The population of Lille was reduced to one-half of what it 
had been during the war. That was partly because the soldiers 
went away. It was considerably because people died. They 
died because they did not have enough to eat. That was the 
long and short of it. They always had, of course, something to 
eat. They did not starve to death, as we would say, in a 
famine, but they starved to death virtually, they died of some- 
thing else first. They died of tuberculosis, they died of dis- 
eases of childhood, if they were children, and so on. There 
were half as many people in Lille when the war ended as when 
it began. The tuberculosis death rate was multiplied by two. 
The number of children born was one-eighth of what it had 
been before for the same period of time, and the proportion of 
deaths among those that were born was substantially greater 
than it was before. That is a pretty black picture of the 
occupied territory and the occupied territory was a great deal 
bigger in terms of numbers than the number of the refugees. 
Just run your mind over that. There were six million Bel- 
gians in occupied territory. There were three million French, 
there were four and a half millions of Serbians, there were a 
million Italians, there were five and three-quarter millions of 
Rumanians, there were twenty-two million Russians in terri- 
tory occupied by Germans, a total of forty-two million people 
who lived under occupation by an enemy army and suffered all 
those hardships of oppression and repression and lack of food 
in the taking away of their supplies and clothing and fuel and 
all. Their mode of living was reduced to about the lowest 
consistent with living at all. 



17 



That is only a start, really, of the hardships that the war 
brought to the peoples of Europe, because the shortage of food 
during the latter part of the war applied not only to the 
blockaded territory, but it applied to many of the Allied coun- 
tries, Italy and Greece, and those countries in the south of 
Europe, though they were not behind the blockade, actually 
experienced a shortage of food. That increased sickness and 
death among them and they came actually in sight of hunger. 
That is, the whole people, the whole 33,000,000 of Italy actually 
suffered a lack of sufficient food. You only have to look at 
them to recognize that fact, but it is indisputable when you look 
at the figures of what happened. I must speak for a minute or 
two more to show that all through that part of the world the 
diseases that have been slowly brought under some degree of 
control absolutely broke loose. All that has been done in the 
way of prevention of disease practically disappeared. People 
could not afford health work and they were too busy to think 
about it. Tuberculosis, which had been reduced about forty 
per cent, in Italy, shot up twenty-five per cent, in two years. 
Malaria, which was on the way to disappearance, jumped back 
to where it was twenty-two years ago. Typhoid fever increased 
all over the country, because of the people camping out of doors. 
The typhus epidemic of Serbia was a direct result of the 
crowding of those people in houses and lack of opportunity for 
cleanliness. A peculiar fact is that the louse always seems to 
enlist with the soldier. The talk and jokes and slang of the 
soldier were about the cootie, to a very considerable degree, 
but it is no joke because if there is typhus fever, the cootie 
carries it from one man to the next. The epidemic that cost 
150,000 Serbian lives was a war epidemic of typhus. The 
"flu" itself we don't know all about, but we know that it came 
at the same time as the greatest strain of all. We know that it 
had been hibernating, as it were, in some area back in eastern 
Europe, where Russia joins Asia, and that after being quiescent 
there for a good while, it broke loose. Then this going back 
and forth of soldiers and refugees and everybody in every 
direction all the time spread it all over the world with a rapidity 
that has never been known before. The deaths from the "flu" 
which we know a great deal about in this country must be put 
down as due, in a very considerable degree, not wholly very 



18 

likely, but as being chargeable, to a substantial extent, to the 
fact of war. Italy lost about three times as many people from 
the "flu" as we did, in proportion to our population. Take 
Serbia, which, before the war, had a population of 5,000,000 
people. It was growing at the rate of about 90,000 a year. 
They cannot bother to keep vital statistics in wartime, but the 
general agreement of a good many people who have studied the 
subject, by the Austrians while they were there and by the 
Serbians, and by the English, and by the Americans who 
worked there, is that, as a net result of all these things, Serbia 
not only lost all her normal growth, but actually lost a fifth of 
her entire population as it stood at the beginning of the war, 
coming to the end of the war with 4,000,000 people instead of 
5,000,000 as she began it. 

I must speak just a second of one other thing, one of the 
strange things you must think about a little while before you 
get the full bearing of it, and that is the tremendous reduction 
of the birth rate in those countries. It is not necessarily a good 
thing to have too many people in the world, so far as I know, 
but a differential reduction in the birth rate may be a very bad 
thing. It was a very bad thing that France's population stood 
stationary for the last forty years at about forty million, while 
Germany's went on from thirty-eight or thirty-nine to sixty- 
four millions. That was a very bad thing for the peace and 
future of the world. With extraordinary uniformity, with 
extraordinary evenness, the birth rate of those countries in 
which the war occurred fell until it was fifty per cent., or in 
Serbia apparently much less than fifty per cent, of what it had 
been. So that in the number of people who will enter the 
schools of the future, there will be a great hiatus when you 
come to the ages that would have been born in the years 1915 
to 1919. A very curious thing is that it was true of Belgium, as 
well as of France and Italy, and in Belgium it was not because 
the men were in the army or out of the country. It was some- 
thing about these bad standards of living and depression, being 
under the enemy army; the lack of food, of clothing and of 
shelter. The babies would just simply not be born. The actual 
shortage of births already in Europe among the white peoples 
in the world who are to carry the white man's burden, is about 
ten million in number, and to the extent that it is due to the 



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19 

lower standards of living, shortage of income, bad housing and 
the like, it will go on in some degree for we don't know how 
long. Looking backward years from now, in the great contest 
that may arise between the peoples of the world, it may well be 
that that reduction in the number of effective members of the 
white race, already ten millions in number, besides the deaths 
in the war itself, may prove to have been the most serious 
result of the many serious results of the great war. 

That is a terrible picture, but it is a true picture. It is a 
picture which, perhaps, only those who have been accustomed 
to work in the various fields of human welfare would 
thoroughly understand. You could travel all over Europe and 
not see it. You would have to study it. You would have to 
examine into the underlying facts. The people of Europe do 
not know it. The people of Italy, with few exceptions, do not 
know it, do not know to what extent they lost. They just know 
they are in a bad way. Only those accustomed to deal with the 
statistics of lives and births and deaths and disease, of poverty 
and sickness, see the extent to which this terrible calamity rests 
upon the people of Europe. 

We can do a little about it. I wish we could do more. We 
can, at least, look facts in the face. We can be patient and 
sympathetic with people who have gone through such stress and 
suffering as we have not come in sight of. We can make allow- 
ances for the bitternesses and skepticisms and pessimisms that 
are bound to exist all through Europe. We can refrain from 
doing anything that in any way would lead them to feel that 
America is not interested in Europe, that when our soldiers 
said good-bye to France we, as a nation, said good-bye to 
Europe. We cannot do that, we cannot be onlookers, specta- 
tors. We have got to stand by our Allies in Europe in spirit, in 
sympathy, in understanding, until the wounds of the war are 
healed. ( Applause. ) 



Judge Brown : On behalf of this gathering, and for my- 
self, I want to thank Colonel Folks for this intelligent presen- 
tation of the results of the war on the human race. It has been 
inspiring and it ought to make us sympathetic with those people 
who suffered so very much more than we have. I thank him 
in your behalf and for myself for this wonderful address. 



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